Serial bullies in the workplace

What is a serial bully?

This person can behave appropriately when blended in with other team members. Rather than using obvious methods of bullying, they may do it in a way that is harder for onlookers to recognise such as abusing the authority that comes with their job, emotional blackmail, malicious gossip and one-on-one confrontations when there are no witnesses.

The serial bully likely feels threatened by colleagues with competence, integrity and popularity. Soon enough, they may pick someone out and project onto them their own inadequacy and incompetence. Using unwarranted criticism and threats, he or she controls them and subjugates them, without a thought for the contribution they make to the organisation. When the bully can see the person they are targeting are close to complaining about them or expose the misconduct, they might neutralise the target by isolating them and destroying their credibility and reputation among managers and peers, and then putting them out of the picture through dismissal, forced resignation or even early retirement. Once the target has gone, within about two weeks, the bully's focus turns to someone else, and the cycle starts again.

How to recognise if you have a serial bully in your workplace

• Having an uncharacteristic drop in performance without any logical explanation
• Complaining of bullying or similar by a particular person, or by that person's team
• Claiming to be suffering from "burnout", "stress", "stress breakdown", "depression" or similar
• Going on long-term sick leave because of stress or some debilitating psychological problem, and never returning to work
• Having a grievance about poor treatment that takes months or even years to close down
• Unexpectedly taking early or ill health retirement
• Being fired for reasons that were trivial or out-of-character
• In any case leaving in unsatisfactory circumstances, with the true reason hidden behind a compromise agreement with a confidentiality clause

Faced with the above, some businesses would strive to establish the cause and deal with it, to prevent any recurrence. For organisations where this is normal, but thought to be symptomatic of weak, awkward employees rather than dysfunctional management, bullying is likely to be an institutional problem. Such employers are likely to be reluctant to acknowledge even the possibility that bullying is an issue, doing what they can to conceal it, including by attributing responsibility for employees' predicaments to the employees themselves.

Business owners and shareholders should note that a culture of bullying is likely to be hiding far more damage to their business than just occasionally destroying the health and careers of competent staff members.

Virtual immunity

Serial bullying at work is unlikely to lead to disciplinary proceedings because their most common offences may be shrouded in doubt. They can explain away just about anything, and frequently blames others and distracts attention from the real issues. Finding someone with the courage and integrity to investigate impartially is even harder.

Projection

Bullies often project their inadequacies, shortcomings, behaviours etc on to other people to distract and divert attention away from themselves and their inadequacies and to avoid facing up to the same.

How they project themselves to others

Charismatic, charming serial bullies are often capable of anticipating what people want to hear, and then saying it. By applying this skill, they convince others to follow and support them. They often portray themselves and are talked about by their disciples as clever, successful, important, wonderful, kind, caring and compassionate people.

Although they usually have little concept of empathy, they may use charm and mimicry to compensate. However, their attempts at empathy are superficial, amateur, often inappropriately timed or over the top. Rather than being motivated by genuine concern, such attempts are to make the bully look good in front of witnesses.

Arrogance

Serial bullies are frequently self-opinionated and display arrogance, audacity, a superior sense of entitlement, and appear to have a sense of invulnerability and untouchability. They take risks that others would regard as foolhardy. They can have an unhealthy need to feel recognised and wanted, which draws them to positions of power, which they then go on to abuse.

Intellect

In trying to be popular, serial bullies like to be perceived as having a superior intelligence. However, by trying too hard, they can appear intellectually dysfunctional. They often miss the semantic meaning of language, misinterpret what is said, sometimes wrongly thinking that comments of a satirical, ironic or general negative nature apply to him or herself.

Inappropriate body language

Some bullies might use inappropriate and hostile body language, such as inappropriate eye contact, either too little or too much. Some bullies display ill-advised interpersonal behaviour, invasion of personal space, gestures or comments including inappropriate innuendo.

Unreliability and dishonesty

Another trait that illustrates the lack of conscience, is that serial bullies are often well-practised and convincing liars who will most likely make up anything spontaneously to fit their needs at that moment, especially when asked to account for their actions. Serial bullies excel at deception and should never be underestimated in their capacity to deceive.

Duplicity

Duplicity is deceiving others by pretending to act with one intention while aiming to satisfy another. Bullies at work act with duplicity by pretending to be acting in the interests of the employer and others, when actually they are acting in their own interests.